Farewell insects, you were kind of fun

Sometimes insects can be a damn nuisance. If you’ve ever been assailed by a cloud of midges, annoyed by flies, or stung by a wasp, you might agree. Insects in the shape of the Anopheles mosquito have been responsible for the spreading of malaria, one of the biggest scourges of mankind in history.

I remember once, having been stung by a wasp, I commented to a friend that it wouldn’t be such a bad things if wasps, and a few other selected insect species, vanished from the face of the earth. But he responded that wasps are actually an essential part of the food chain, preying on smaller creatures and themselves providing a food source for larger ones. That’s the way it is in nature. Which is why the news that insect populations are due to take a nose dive in the next few decades is worrying indeed. For we are part of the food chain - in fact we’re at the top of it. But for us to thrive, creatures further down the chain need to thrive too, and if part of that chain is disrupted, everything suffers.

I was reading the other day about the clearances in the Scottish highlands in the early 19th century. Thousands of men, women and children were evicted from their homes and villages by Scottish lairds anxious to increase the profitability of their land by raising Cheviot sheep, and encouraging deer for hunting purposes. Today we see these acts as monstrous, and rightly so. But today, landowners are are acting with a similar disregard of almost anything unrelated to profit; hence they farm their land as intensively as possible, encouraging monoclonal blocks of plants, protected by insecticides that discourage any incursion of their cash-crops. If you’ve ever seen a vast area of countryside glowing a golden yellow with the flowers of oil seed rape, you’ll know what I mean. But farmers who use. Their land in this way threaten the entire ecosystem, which of course includes us humans too.
And if you think things have come to a sorry pass in this country, spare a thought for south-easr Asia, and especially Indonesia, where as I write this, vast swathes of virgin rainforest are being replaced by the monoculture of palm oil plantations, threatening the existence of, not only insects but rare and precious animals such as the orangutan and other beasts whose DNA is so closely related to our own they should be considered as first cousins to the human race.

It isn’t just climate change that threatens us human beings, and the animal and plant kingdoms. The pell-mell pace of agricultural methods that take no account of natural diversity is just as bad. Possibly worse. I’m 68 now; at best I’ve got a couple of decades left. But the young folk, your children and grandchildren, they’ll have to live in the brave and terrible worlds we have created for them. I wish them luck. They’ll need it.